


Autocannibalism of the Mind

by JaneTheNya



Series: Act → Disarm [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide, Misgendering, Nonbinary Chara (Undertale), Reader is Chara (Undertale), Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:08:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23314420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTheNya/pseuds/JaneTheNya
Summary: You wish you could accept that your family loves you, but there's tugging at your mind that you don't deserve it, and that voice in your head won't rest until it eats itself alive.
Series: Act → Disarm [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1616899
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

You’re sitting on the couch, shifting uncomfortably as you wait for Asriel to come out of the bathroom when he’s ready to go and help Dad. Your shoes are on, caked in mud, and you’re being careful to keep them off the couch. You’re starting to feel at home in this house, and that makes you uncomfortable, and guilty. None of this is yours. You’re taking advantage of it, at best. You bite your lower lip.

You have a momentary temptation to roll up your sleeves again, but you aren’t that clueless. You’ve learned by now to only do that in the privacy of the bathroom with a locked door, after the way it made Mom worry when she first saw the scars. You’ve always been bad at explaining it to others, because it makes so much sense to you, and it’s baffling that you have to explain it. The fact that they don’t understand it is what’s so confusing.

You let out a sigh, wishing there was something you could do. You’re feeling yourself get impatient, which is wrong, and bad. You have no right to be annoyed with them. You’re the one who’s taking everything from them, after all. Taking resources you have no right to. Taking, and taking, and nothing else. Just as you always have.

Saving you from spiralling further into your own mind, you feel something soft on your shoulder. Your eyes widen as you instinctively jolt away, looking back in a panic. It’s your mother, looking at you with concern.

“My child…?” she begins to ask, softly, worry and concern in her voice, sympathy and compassion that you don’t deserve. You can’t look her in the eyes, so you glance at your feet instead.

“My apologies,” you mumble, just loud enough for her to hear. “I was startled, I guess.” She approaches you carefully, kneeling down and placing a hand on your shoulder, smoothing down the loose ends in your messy hair with her free hand.

“Do not apologize, my child.” she says, moving her hand gently along your head. For a monster you’d been so terrified of when you first saw her, she had a touch softer than anyone you’d ever met. “It is I who should have been careful not to scare you.”

You hate how jumpy you are. You’ve always been a coward, who gets easily scared by things. It bothers you to no end, but there’s no fixing it. You’ve always been this way and it doesn’t seem like it will ever get better. You’ll just have to live your life being scared of everything, you suppose.

You hear the telltale creak of the bathroom door opening, loose on its hinges, as Asriel steps out. He greets you with a smile, not thinking anything of how weak you must look right then, scared and vulnerable and letting your mother comfort you.

“Howdy, Chara!” he says cheerfully. “You ready to go help Dad?” You’re tempted to say no, starting to feel sick. You want to go to your room and hide under the covers, like you did the first few days you stayed here. You can’t just say that though, so you offer a pathetic nod in response, forcing a smile back. “Great!” he exclaims, “let’s go!”

You give another weak nod, eager enough to pull away from your mother and head to the garden. She has a gentle, comforting touch, but you’re not particularly in the mood to be touched right now, and maybe the garden will be quiet and you can try to calm down and not think about how you don’t deserve to be here.

You slide yourself off the couch and onto your feet, your legs feeling weak. The garden is nice, and you like it there. Dad is gentle too, and he gives you big hugs when you want them, which isn’t often, and sometimes he also hugs you when you don’t want, and you scream and kick and feel guilty afterwards, and he apologizes, worst of all. He apologizes to you, even though it’s your fault, and that’s funny. It’s funny because it’s bad, and you’re disgusting. You let out a small chuckle, involuntarily, but manage to stop yourself before it escalates.

You begin to follow Asriel out of the room, trying not to look back at your mother’s concerned expression. Concern you don’t deserve. Worry you don’t deserve. She made you lunch today, even though you’re not her real child, and you’re a human, and she should hate you, the way you hate you.

When you first arrived here, after you got over the initial fear and confusion of your life being saved by a bunch of strange monsters, you spent days in your bed. You didn’t eat until you physically had to, and then you were given food, which didn’t make sense, because you didn’t deserve that. Mom made you your first meal, and it was really good, too good for you, and you knocked the bowl off the table and had a laughing fit because it was so funny how you were being fed even though you didn’t deserve it, and how just a few days before you had tried to die, and you should still be trying to die.

It took your new family a few days to understand why you started laughing when you were upset. They all gave those familiar stares of confusion and concern, looking at you like you were crazy, because you are. Even you don’t know why you do it. It’s an impulse, when you want to cry, because you’re not allowed to cry, because crying is for babies, and you’re not a baby, and you can’t cry, because it’s embarrassing, and it’s not manly, and that’s funny, because you’re not a man. That’s what your parents said, though. The other ones.

You follow Asriel out into the garden where Dad greets him with a hug and you with a smile and a wave, and you try to force a smile, but you can’t, so you just wave back. You don’t feel like talking today, so you just get to work watering the flowers. They don’t let you use most of the tools anymore, because one time when you were helping you used them to hurt yourself, and that made them upset, which was weird, because you deserved it. If you’re not going to die, the least you can do is be hurt, really badly. You were hurt really badly when you fell. You didn’t die, though, which was unfortunate. You were supposed to die.

You keep watering the flowers. They’re really pretty, but you always forget what they’re called. They remind you of the Golden Flowers from the surface, which you liked, but it was one of the only things you liked up there. You also weren’t supposed to like flowers, because they were girly, and you weren’t supposed to like girly things. That’s what your parents said, anyway. The other ones.

You like giving the flowers water, because they need water, and they also deserve it. Flowers don’t hurt anyone and they aren’t bad, like you. So they should get water. You set to work watering as many as you can. You’ve gotten pretty good at it by this point, because Dad taught you, even though it was a waste of time, and he shouldn't have bothered.

Watering the flowers is relaxing, and you try to focus on it. It’s a little easier when you can trick yourself into focusing on the flowers, or something like that, to try and quiet the constant screaming in your brain about how you’re wretched and evil and how you don’t deserve to live. It’s something.

You wish you could focus on the flowers this time, but an idea pops into your head, and it isn’t a good one, but it’s also not bad, because it would hurt you, and hurting you is good. You make a mental note of it, and suppress another laugh, and a smile appears on your face for the first time all day.

Asriel notices you smiling, and he waves at you with a big beaming expression that feels like a punch to the gut. Your smile disappears.


	2. Chapter 2

You wish you had killed yourself when you climbed the mountain.

Back when you climbed the mountain, you were just an unwanted, useless, worthless kid. You didn’t have anyone’s love, and you didn’t deserve it. No one would have been hurt if you had died. Nobody would care. You wouldn’t have had a funeral. Nobody would have come.

Now, you’ve made bonds. You have a family now. There are people who care about you now, good people, people who don’t deserve to be hurt by your death. You deserve to die, but they don’t deserve the pain of your death. You’ve accidentally created bonds you don’t deserve, and now you’re lost in the process of figuring out the consequences. You can’t die without hurting people who don’t deserve to be hurt.

Your and Asriel’s room of the house is quiet at this time of day. Dad is out talking to the Royal Scientist about something and your mother is finishing up lunch with Asriel’s help. You usually have free reign over the house at this time, even though you don’t deserve that level of freedom.

You’d taken up hobbies since coming here, ones you had never been allowed to try out back on the surface. Your favorite was knitting, because it allowed you to create something. You like creating things, you think, things that make others happy. You figure it’s because all you’ve ever done is destroy, and make people unhappy, and it’s nice to try and do the opposite for a change.

You open the chest by your bedside. It’s almost identical to the one on Asriel’s side. Your parents had insisted on getting you practically identical amenities to the ones Asriel had, which was stupid, because you didn’t deserve that. They were treating some dying kid they found rotting at the bottom of a big chasm the same as their own flesh-and-blood child, the prince of monsterkind. It’s so silly it makes you laugh, a lot. You can’t stop laughing. Tears start to run down your face.

“My child, are you alright?” you hear Mom’s voice call from the other room. You bite your tongue, suppressing every instinct you have to curse or cry out for help. You’re not supposed to cry, and you’re not supposed to ask for help. Those were for babies, and you were old enough now to do things on your own.

“I’m fine,” you call back. Your voice is raspy, and strained, and it’s disgusting. You don’t like to talk much, but you think a lot. Your mind never shuts up. Your parents think you’re quiet, which couldn’t be less true, because your mind is always talking. It never shuts up, and you hate it, and you wish it would be quiet. You want it to stop.

Emotions are swirling around in your mind as you dig through your box for the knitting needles. They’re big, and they’re sharp. You can’t believe you didn’t put this together sooner, and you’re not exactly happy that you did.

You hold them in your hands for a moment, thinking over your options. If you do now what your brain is screaming at you to do, then you’ll probably get them taken away. When you fell down into the underground, you had a pocket knife, and you got that taken away because you kept using it to hurt yourself. Then your parents started locking away the kitchen knives, because you would take them when no one was looking and use them to hurt yourself. Then they stopped letting you eat with a knife, because you would try and use them to hurt yourself. Recently, you’d even been taken off forks, because Mom caught you desperately poking at the skin in your hand with their small points.

Asriel thinks it’s weird that you only get a spoon when you eat now. The first time Mom handed out meals and you didn’t get a fork, he asked her if she’d forgotten, and she’d had that really painful, insufferable look on her face, a sheepish look, nervous, trying to find a good explanation. “Just tell the truth,” you’d thought at the time. “Tell him I’m crazy, that I’m evil and wretched and I can’t have anything sharp or I’ll hurt myself with it. Make him look at me the same after hearing that.”

You’re starting to laugh again, and it’s so hard to suppress it. This bizarre, strained, involuntary giggle escapes your mouth as you viciously shake your head, trying to be done with it, trying to make those thoughts go away.

You don’t want them to stop letting you knit. You like to knit. It’s kind of relaxing, it makes you feel good. You knitted a sweater for Dad recently, and the look on his face was… hard to describe. It was like you’d… made someone happy, made them proud. You were equally as shocked as he was. You wonder sometimes if your parents hate you, because you’re not an especially good kid, you don’t show them or tell them you love them enough, even though you do, you love them so much, and it hurts, it hurts that you can’t express it. But what are you supposed to do? There’s no way to explain to them that they make you hate yourself a little less, because that’s not what love is for normal people. That’s only what love is to crazy people like you.

You look down. You’ve been dragging the tip of the needle across your arm as your mind wandered and raced. A thick line runs across the end of your forearm, splitting the skin, and a large pool of dark blood is rising up in it.

You sigh, coming back to reality. Cutting always does that for you. Suddenly, once there’s bleeding, you can go from being deranged and rambling on in your insanity, to handling things rationally. You know how to deal with blood at this point, you know how to treat the wound and keep it hidden and clean the object you used.

You like to cut for that reason, it brings back a normal, understandable state of mind. But you think that sort of thinking only makes sense to you, because you’re crazy, so you’ve never told anyone.

You rise to your feet, letting out another long sigh. You’re tired, but the screaming in your brain has gone away. Now the problem has become, at least, a little understandable. You make your way toward the bathroom, suppressing the twinges of guilt as you look around to ensure no one can see.

You enter the bathroom, and lock the door.


End file.
